Cricket Experts

When George Bernard Shaw referred to cricket as a game played by 22 flanelled fools and watched by 22,000, he could not have anticipated that, a hundred years later, the inaugural match of World Cup 2011 between India and Bangladesh would be watched by 18.8 million on the ESPN channel and by 20 million on DD, thanks to the idiot box. Neither could Shaw have anticipated that each TV news-channel would have its own experts to analyse what could happen for the benefit of the foolish masses. Thanks to the ongoing World Cup, cricket of the one-day international (ODI) variety is played for six to seven hours but talked about for days before and after the match. The obsessive focus these days is on talking cricket and not just playing the game. During a match, perfect strangers can walk up to each other and pose the query, "What's the score?" And all this is over and above the live coverage of the game on the sports channel which follows that up by asking the man of the match to "talk us through your performance" .

Like a famous American golfer quipped decades ago, "One day a deaf-anddumb player will win all golf's big tournaments and no one will know what happened!" Sometimes, of course, even the TV newschannels don't seem to know what happened. At 5.26 pm last Saturday, minutes after Virender Sehwag's 175 took his country to a mammoth total against Bangladesh, a leading TV newschannel flashed the following headline on the bottom of the screen: "Sehwag's century takes India to 370 against Pakistan!" After flashing that headline three times, the TV news-channel corrected it to "Sehwag's century takes India to 370 against Sri Lanka!" What's a little geography between friends who are foes only on the battlefield of the game?